his or her own ‘‘Wnal vocabulary’’ and also aware that such vocabularies can
neither be justiWed nor refuted by argument but only replaced by other
vocabularies.
In these terms, Rorty sees theWnal vocabulary of liberal political culture as
the product of the institutional settlements that ended the wars of religion
and the Enlightenment ideals that accompanied the end of aristocratic and
monarchical government (Rorty 1998 , 167 – 85 ). As such, it represents the
historically singular and contingent expression of a particular modus vivendi
that has evolved in societies of Western European origin. Rawls’s political
liberalism is ironic in this sense: conscious of the plurality of reasonable
conceptions of the good which must cohabit peacefully in a well-ordered
society and committed to achieving this through the exercise of practical
rather than theoretical reason. The truth or falsity of moral judgments is not
at issue, only their acceptability in accordance with accepted practices of
public political reason (Rawls 1993 , xx, 94 ).
Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze are also, each in their own way, ironists in
this sense. One of the avowed aims of Foucauldian genealogy is to demon-
strate the contingency of the discourses in which our public political debates
are conducted, whether they involve the treatment of the insane, the pun-
ishment of criminals, or the nature and purpose of government. For this
reason, he describes the modern systems of mental illness, punishment, and
sexuality as ‘‘pure singularities’’ rather than the incarnation of an essence or
the determination of a species (Foucault 1996 , 395 ). The targets of his
genealogies are not universal principles of justice or right but particular
assemblages of power and knowledge:dispositifsof madness, punishment,
sexuality, or government. These emerge on the basis of particular, contin-
gent, historical conditions that enable them to operate within a given social
context.
Derrida’s practice of deconstruction also aYrms the necessity of a genea-
logical study of the history and interpretations of a given concept. His
discussion of law and justice inForce of Lawcalled for an historical genealogy
of diVerent concepts of law, right, and justice, and of the manner in which
these are bound up with responsibility and the network of concepts related to
this, such as property, intentionality, will, freedom, conscience, conscious-
ness, etc. (Derrida 1992 , 20 ). Similarly, his approach to the concept of
democracy inPolitics of Friendshipis genealogical. He asks how the idea of
democracy arose in the West, in what terms it has been thought, and in
relation to what other concepts it has been deWned. Chief among these are the
post-structuralism and liberal pragmatism 129